The Iron Man by Ted Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Strange, Lyrical, Anti-War Science Fiction Fairy Tale Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man (1968) is an odd, unpredictable, and charming hybrid sf fairy tale novella for children. It runs 53 pages, including dynamic and stark illustrations by Andrew Davidson. The book is comprised of five chapters. The first three introduce the giant Iron Man, who appears at the top of a cliff, observes the sea, and steps off the cliff to fall and disintegrate at the bottom, after which he manages to reassemble himself (starting with a hand finding an eye), and then walks off into the sea missing one unretrieved ear… only to exit the sea and descend on a British farming community, where he takes to eating every metal thing he finds, including farm machinery and barbed wire fences. This is untenable for the local farmers, who plan to trap the “monster” in a giant pit. A boy called Hogarth (the son of a farmer), who first saw the Iron Man and feels guilty over luring him into the trap, wants to find a win-win way to co-exist with the “monster.” The last two chapters take the story in a new direction, as the Iron Man, hitherto a giant among small humans, has to deal with a much larger giant “space-bat-angel-dragon” who comes from the constellation of Orion to land on Australia, covering the entire country and declaring that it’s going to eat every living thing in the world. Is the Iron Man a robot? He works by cogs and gears and is made of metal and has eyes that can see infrared, but Hughes is uninterested in imagining or explaining who made the Iron Man or why or how he was made and so on. The word robot never appears. Written by an outstanding poet, the book features a concise, rhythmic style that rises now and then to terse rhapsody or lyrical muscularity, as in the first appearance of the Iron Man: Taller than a house, the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, on the very brink, in the darkness. The wind sang through his iron fingers. His great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but as big as a bedroom, slowly turned to the right, slowly turned to the left. His iron ears turned, this way, that way. He was hearing the sea. His eyes, like headlamps, glowed white, then red, then infra-red, searching the sea. He swayed in the strong wind that pressed against his back. He swayed forward, on the brink of the high cliff. Or as in a passage describing the British spring: So the Spring came round the following year, leaves unfurled from the buds, daffodils speared up from the soil, and everywhere the grass shook new green points... The story must appeal to children, who like stories about small characters outsmarting big ones, as Hogarth deals with the Iron Man in the first part and as the Iron Man deals with the space-being in the second part. Also, children like eating, and there is a lot of eating in the story, as when the Iron Man samples some delectable scrap heap metal rubbish: He picked up a greasy black stove and chewed it like toffee. There were delicious crumbs of chrome on it. He followed that with a double-decker bedstead and the brass knobs made his eyes crackle with joy. However, some themes seemed aimed at adults. Themes about communication and co-existence between disparate beings, as well as some 1960s anti-war messaging. Really a “star spirit” given to singing the peaceful music of the spheres, the space-bat-angel-dragon came to earth because it was excited by all “the battling shouts and the war-cries” here. And the ending is a kind of deus ex machina fantasy of peace brought by the Iron Man and the dragon-angel from outer space. But the book is never sentimental or didactic. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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